Mendel’s experiments were successful mainly because
Mendel's experiments succeeded largely because he selected traits showing discontinuous variation with clearly separable phenotypic classes controlled by single major genes. Pea characters like seed shape, flower colour and pod form segregated into discrete categories without intermediate blending, enabling counting and ratio calculation. Polygenic continuous traits would have produced overlapping distributions obscuring segregation, variable environment would increase noise, linked genes would distort independent assortment, focus on unlinked Mendelian discontinuous characters was key to disc
Ref: Griffiths et al., Introduction to Genetic Analysis, 12th ed., Chapter 2: Mendel's Success Discontinuous Traits
